Amazon has launched a new program today with the aim of educating young people to become cloud experts of the future.

Of course, given the company’s huge Amazon Web Services (AWS) business, it’s not exactly an altruistic move on its part. Nonetheless, AWS Educate aims to “help educators and students use real-world cloud technology in the classroom.”

The program will be free for educational institutions, teachers and students, following a successful application. If you are accepted, you’ll get credits fro AWS services for testing (like Amazon EC2, S3 and Amazon RDS).

There’s also Web training and self-study sessions to give hands-on experience with the technologies.

Amazon said it will also hold real-life and virtual events, as well as provide a wide-rage of materials for students and teachers.

With cloud computing looking set to be a mainstay of technology, tooling up the next generation makes a lot of sense. Particularly for Amazon if it can get a generation of cloud experts learning and locked-in to using its own tools.